Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these traditional forms, Shiki released them from outdated conventions and made them more responsive to newer trends in artistic expression. Using extensive readings of Shiki's own writings and accounts of the poet by his contemporaries and family, Donald Keene charts Shiki's revolutionary (and often contradictory) experiments with haiku and tanka. Keene particularly highlights random incidents and encounters in his portrait of this tragically short life, moments that elicited significant shifts and discoveries in Shiki's work. The push and pull of a profoundly changing society is vividly felt in Keene's narrative, which also includes sharp observations of other recognizable characters, such as the famous novelist and critic Natsume Soseki.